Synopsis (taken from Amazon)
Tree planters on the run from parasitic insects. A physicist who has become the target of a murderous airline. Teenagers trapped in a museum with an eldritch horror. An escaped pit fighter thrust into a desperate stand at a sagging mountain fortress. And a luckless cowboy sailing across a sea of grass to the bloody resurrection of an elder god. Welcome to Joel McKay’s It Came from the Trees and Other Violent Aberrations, a collection of five page-turners as strange, disparate and bloody as their titles suggest.
So, grab a stiff drink, turn the lights down low, settle into your favorite reading nook and enjoy this brief but memorable collection of tales from one of the newest voices in Canadian pulp fiction.
Review
Anthologies are a great way to get a few stories together. They are normally of the same genre—which they are—but they aren’t. Yes, they were all creepy, but they ranged in time period, character attributes, and type of horror. It was an extremely diverse array of stories.
My favourite thing about anthologies is getting to the scary stuff without much preamble, and Joel Mckay did not disappoint. The first story is super creepy with the perfect twist ending. It quickly became my top read, but don’t stop reading there; they are all intriguing.
The final story (ranking as my second favourite) is an interesting combo of creep and cowboy. I didn’t think those two things could go together, but they were perfectly meshed.
This collection’s brief explanation of why the author wrote each story was unique, and it was interesting to see where he got some of the inspiration.
If you like creepy, you need this book.
Get your copy here (affiliate link – thank you for your support).